Home for Christmas
by rainpaint
Summary: My Christmas present to my faithful, much-loved readers!


**Merry Christmas**

I'd hoped to have this finished in time for Ty's B-day, which I've figured to be December 16. If you want to know how I figured this out, ask please. It's rather long and complicated. Anyway, enjoy this lovely fuzzy Christmas Heartland fanfic! And Merry Christmas Eve.

Just to let you know, I finished this in the basement - on Christmas Eve - while my dad was wrapping presents and my little brother was running around and showing me his Legos. /bows/

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Purposefully, she strode across the campus, her cell phone pressed to her ear. A grin tugged at her wind-chapped lips as she heard the familiar deep voice on the other end. "Hey," Amy greeted him, a brisk breeze tossing her light brown hair. "Just wanted to let you know I'm heading to my last exam. I've just got to pack a few more things, and then I'm on my way home."

"All right. I can't wait to see you," Ty replied. Amy could close her eyes and see the smile lighting up his green eyes.

"Me too." She tucked a wayward strand of light brown hair behind her ear.

"Be careful on your way back. It actually looks like snow here."

"Mmmm, a white Christmas!" Amy remarked eagerly, picturing the stables and fields covered in a glistening blanket of pure white snow. "Don't worry, it's sunny here," she assured him. As if to prove her point, sunlight glinted off the ring on her left hand. A few clouds convened in the distance, but other than that the sky was a clear azure.

"Ok. See you soon. I'll be praying for you - for the exam and for the ride home."

"Thanks, Ty," Amy said as the hall where she'd be taking her last final loomed into view. "Love you," she added, a little shyly.

"Love you, too," he replied, his voice warm.

Amy shut her phone down and headed toward the brick building, flanked on either side by bare, gnarled trees that waved their blackened arms at the piercing blue sky. A welcome blast of warm air greeted her, and she felt her fingers and nose gradually thaw as her footsteps echoed down the hallway.

Sitting at the table and waiting for the professor to pass the tests out, Amy, chin in hand, stared at the glinting Claddagh ring on her left ring finger. Her mind was far away from the sleepily warm, fluorescent-lit classroom on the sprawling Virginia Tech campus.

The first half of her final year of veterinary school had crawled by, even with all the intense training and hands-on experience. Come May, she would graduate and return home to Heartland - for good.

For the first three years, she'd spent a good part of her winter, spring, and summer breaks away from Heartland. Her mom's training and her college education had given her countless opportunities to help horses around the world. But unexpected events at the beginning of last summer, the summer before her senior year, had ground her journeys to a halt - permanently.

Within weeks of each other, both Grandpa and Sundance had fallen ill - Sundance was stricken with cancer, and Grandpa had suffered a stroke. For the first time in years, Amy had spent the summer at Heartland, taking care of the sanctuary and nursing her beloved pony back to health. As the heat of summer gradually cooled to a pleasant autumn and both Grandpa and Sundance recuperated, Amy had slowly realized where her heart truly belonged. She was meant to be at Heartland, not out of fear that those she loved would someday be gone, but out of deep love for what and who were there. She'd gone beyond the horizon, had a summer to remember - and her path had led her right where she needed to be.

Through working together during that stressful summer, she and Ty had regained and strengthened their once-strained friendship, which had eventually blossomed into something deeper and more permanent. At one point there had been other people; but, as though it were process of elimination, Will, Alfredo, and Heather had shown both of them that they belonged with each other. Because Will had been glad when she and Ty had broken up, nothing had really come of that. Alfredo had given her fond memories, but in the end Amy had realized they came from incongruous worlds. Heather - Amy wasn't sure what had happened to her, and she wasn't about to ask.

All Amy knew was that Ty had proposed to her at the end of that summer, and she was wearing his engagement ring. Catching her grinning bottom lip between her teeth, she ran her finger over the cool metal of the dazzling Claddagh ring.

The professor's voice jerked Amy out of her reverie and back to the present. Time for the exam, and soon the cacophony of furiously scribbling pens filled the air.

**:.:.:.:.:.:.:.:..:.:**

Two hours later, Amy paused, pen hovering over the paper. Gray eyes scanned the page before she nodded in satisfaction and placed the last period on the test. After gathering her things, she deposited her test on the professor's desk, whispered a "Merry Christmas," and scurried out to the hallway. Only when she was outside did she allow herself a congratulatory, "Yes!" and clenched her fists in glee. Her next-to-last finals were finished.

Suddenly she realized how much colder it had gotten. The air was stinging and damp - the kind of moisture that precedes snowfall. Please don't let it snow, Amy prayed, casting a wary glance at the flat, heavy clouds looming ominously on the horizon. Wispy puffs of breath escaped her mouth like steam from a chugging train as she strode briskly across the campus to her dorm, mentally planning what she had to do. She rolled her eyes; saying goodbye to her friends would take longer than packing for the trip home.

As she reached out to open the door to her hall, something transiently cold and feather-light fluttered onto her hair. A glance up earned her a dusting of tiny dancing snowflakes that powdered her face and clung to her eyelashes.

From a thickly cloudy sky swirled impossibly small, delicate flakes that stuck to the stone pathway, the dried grass, and the stone pathway. Her breath freezing like white smoke in the chilly air, Amy pushed the door open and headed inside.

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Calculating gray eyes narrowed in determination, glancing from the final three T-shirts to the bulging suitcase. Her slender figure silhouetted in the pale shaft of moonlight streaming through the window, Amy commanded the shirts, "You will fit." She shoved the t-shirts in among all her jeans, shirts, and sweaters and, after a bit of wrestling with the zipper, managed to get the suitcase closed - except for the last three inches.

Amy folded her arms and sent a scathing glare at the suitcase. Sitting on it, she managed to compress the full-to-bursting luggage enough to zip it closed. After hopping off, she lugged the bag to the floor with a thud. Now it was just a matter of packing the car.

Thinking about all that she had planned for her Christmas vacation, she couldn't suppress a smile. She couldn't wait to get back into the Heartland routine, right down to mucking out stalls and preparing feeds. In between all of the regular horse work, she hoped to bake cookies with her niece and sister and decorate the farmhouse. When it was all decked out for Christmas, the yard had a magical, fairy-tale feel to it.

And then there were wedding plans. Amy was sure that Nancy would have thought up a surfeit of ideas, from decorations to food. At some point, Amy planned to visit the bridal boutique downtown, where Lou had purchased her own dress a few years ago.

No matter what else she got caught up in over vacation, she would make time to go riding, just she and Ty. That was her highest priority - spending time with her fiancé. She couldn't make up for the past four years - four years of convincing herself that she shouldn't call him now; he was probably too busy - four years of disjointed conversations - four years of burying feelings that were very real but too painful to deal with. With all her heart, Amy wished that she could give those years back to Ty, but now all she could do was make the most of each moment.

The door banged open, jerking her out of her reverie. In the doorway stood India, her carefree, outspoken roommate. "It's really snowing out there!" India exclaimed. As if to prove her point, she clapped her gloved hands and shook out her hair, powdering their carpet with snowflakes that quickly melted.

"Snowing?" Amy echoed as she deposited her purse on the bed and rushed to the window to lift the shades. Rapidly accumulating snow, a luminous, resplendent blue in the moonlight, blanketed the campus. Raking a hand through her hair, Amy dug her cell phone out of her purse. "I'd better call to see what it's like at home."

India sank down onto her rumpled, cluttered bed and watched Amy in amusement. "Didn't you want a white Christmas?"

"Yes, but it's not Christmas yet," Amy pointed out as she punched in the farmhouse number. "It needs to wait until I get home!" She paced the room, waiting for someone to pick up.

On the second ring, Ty answered. "Hey. Have you left yet?"

"No. What's it like there?"

"It's snowing pretty hard."

"What about the roads?" Amy questioned, peering out the window again. From what she could make out, a thin blanket of snow drifted across the roads.

"I cleared the driveway, but I don't think I can shovel all the way from here to the college," Ty replied, a smile in his tone.

"It doesn't look so bad here. I could probably make it," Amy suggested, her voice an incongruous mixture of hope and doubt. She'd never driven in snow before, and her car wasn't four-wheel-drive.

"Amy, I don't want you to even try," Ty told her. "I'd rather know that you were safe and miss a day or two of our time together."

"But - "

"Stay put," Ty firmly interrupted. "It should melt soon, and you'll be home before you know it."

A deflating sigh escaped Amy. "All right," she agreed, knowing that Ty was right but unable to suppress the deep disappointment stealing over her. "I'll talk to you soon. Tell everyone I said hi."

"All right. Love you."

Gray eyes darting to her roommate, Amy hesitated before responding, "Love you, too." As soon as the words left her mouth, she scowled at India, who quickly masked her gleeful grin and averted her dancing gaze. Clicking her phone shut, she heaved a sigh and sank down onto her bed.

The amusement in India's eyes was quickly replaced with sympathy. "I'm going to get some hot chocolate - do you want to come?" she asked, touching Amy's arm.

"No," Amy whispered, disappointment weighing her down. "Thanks, though."

"All right," India replied softly, clicking the door shut and leaving Amy with her thoughts.

"It's just until the snow melts," Amy reasoned with herself, but her tone sounded hollow to her own ears. The other half - the disappointed half - of her mind argued back, _But I wanted to spend all of my Christmas vacation at home, with Grandpa, Nancy, Lou, Scott, Holly - and Ty. _Right now she wanted nothing more than to be in his arms, drinking hot chocolate together in front of a blazing fire, flickering light from the flames dancing on their faces. Angrily, she blinked away burning tears; crying wouldn't help anything. _Stop that_, she berated herself. _The snow will stop, and I'll be able to go home_.

But as wildly swirling snow beat against the windowpane and beads of ice pelted the glass, she felt a nagging doubt work its way into her mind.

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Halfheartedly, Amy folded her piece of paper and began cutting zig-zags. Sitting cross-legged on the cluttered floor, she was surrounded by paper, tubes of glitter, markers, and other crafting accessories, but her mind was back at Heartland. The only thing that stood between her and home was a foot of pristine snow, topped by an inch or two of glistening ice. The past five days had brought consistent, heavy snow; to Amy's disgust and discouragement, it was supposed to snow again tonight. Thick, heavy clouds obscuring the sun corroborated the weather forecast.

The cacophony of half a dozen giggling girls, making paper snowflakes and decorations, chatting, and quoting lines along with "Elf" swirled, around Amy. But she couldn't bring herself to join in the fun. Perfunctorily, she snipped at her snowflake, not really seeing the white paper in her hands.

Or the scissors, for that matter. When she unfolded the paper, she discovered that she'd cut right through her snowflake. Sighing through her nose, Amy discarded her irrevocably sheared piece of paper and grabbed another from the pile.

A phantom smile flickered on Amy's lips as Katie, her wide-eyed, enthusiastic expression the mirror-image of the irrepressible, over-sized elf's, quoted a line from the movie. The faint smile was her first in the two hours they'd been working on decorating their dorm. But as she glanced down at the now-finished, slightly uneven snowflake in her hand, her mind went immediately back to Heartland. I wonder what they're doing right now. After attaching a paper clip to the glittery snowflake, she hung it on a branch on their scrawny artificial tree and stepped back, ostensibly to admire her work. A thoughtful expression narrowed her gray eyes, but she wasn't scrutinizing her haphazard decorations. She was thinking about the tree at Heartland and praying that she could get home in time to decorate it.

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"Somebody get the door!" he hollered, dragging the over-sized evergreen onto the back porch. From lugging the tree all the way across the yard, Ty was nearly overheating, but his puffing breath formed clouds in the nippy air.

"Whew!" Scott exclaimed, dropping his end of the tree now that they'd reached the porch. "They seem to get heavier every year."

Ty managed a smile that didn't quite reach his green eyes and a hollow chuckle. "Nah, I think you're just out of shape."

"I dragged the tree all the way here, didn't I?" his future brother-in-law puffed indignantly, gloved hands on his bent knees.

Ty nodded, another faint smile playing at his lips. "Or at least, I let you hold the top branches so you'd think you were helping." Just then, Lou, Holly balanced over her hip, opened the door so that Ty and Scott could drag the tree inside. A carpet of pine needles littered their path from the yard, up the driveway, onto the porch, and through the kitchen to the den.

Twenty minutes later, the tree was up. It would have been easier to do it by himself, Ty reflected, but he liked to make Scott feel as though he were helping.

Standing back as his brother-in-law moved the tree "a little to the right. No, to the left. Forward!" as per his wife's instructions, Ty sighed through his nose. He wished Amy were there to see the tree, to laugh at Lou's insistence on its perfection, to sip hot chocolate with him and admire the tree. He just couldn't bring himself to get into the Christmas spirit with his future in-laws. After all the time he and Amy had spent together during the summer, September, October, and November had dragged by. The thought of Thanksgiving, and then Christmas, had kept him going.

At insistent tugging on his sleeve, Ty looked down. Two-year-old Holly looked up at him, blue eyes wide. "Unca Ty?"

"Yes, Holly?" Ty asked, picking up the little girl, her blond ringlets bouncing on her sweater-clad shoulders. His green eyes sad, he forced a wooden smile even as he felt a pang; Amy had told him how excited she was to spend time with her niece.

"Where's Auntie Amy?" she queried, blue eyes solemn.

He glanced away, his gaze traveling to the thick layer of suffocating snow outside. "She's at the college," he replied in a compulsorily light tone.

"We gonna decorate the tree?" Holly questioned, tilting her head at Ty.

"Not until Auntie Amy gets here." Lou answered for him, reaching her arms out for her daughter. She plucked Holly from Ty's arms and twirled her around, eliciting a high-pitched giggle from the little girl.

"She comin' soon?" Holly's question, even though she was in Lou's arms, was directed at Ty. She was a sharp two-year-old, having picked up on the fact that Ty was the one her often-absent aunt spent the most time with.

Ty hesitated before answering. At the ping of ice bouncing off the windowpane, he glanced out the window and sighed as disappointment pressed down on him. Raking a hand through his hair, he turned back to Holly and offered, "I hope so."

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"Yeah, I guess I'll be there," Amy agreed, but she was unable to muster up even a shred of enthusiasm. Hanging up her phone, she sighed and knelt on the floor beside her suitcase. Perfunctorily, she rummaged through it to find something suitable for a last-minute dorm Christmas soiree.

For ten days, the bulging bag had waited hopefully on the floor, ready for the instant she'd snatch it up, shove it in the car, and drive home. Now it didn't look like she'd even make it home in time for Christmas Eve. Attending a party was the last thing she wanted to do, but at least she could tell her equally disappointed family members that she had something to do the night before Christmas.

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Disinterested green eyes regarded the crooked-winged angel, then drifted to the little girl glancing expectantly up at him. "Do you want to put it on?" he asked, betrayal stabbing him like a knife.

Holly nodded, her halo of blond curls resplendent in the glow of the fairy lights adorning the tree.

Quelling gratuitous resentment, Ty picked Holly up so that she could crown the tree with the tattered angel.

Amy was supposed to be here; it was her job to put the angel on top of the tree. She said she didn't mind if they went ahead and decorated the tree; after all, Christmas was just three days away. But every time Ty picked an ornament out of the box and hung it on the tree, he could hear Amy's disappointed voice.

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"Going to bed early so that Santa will come?" India teased, clipping on an earring.

Amy appreciated her friend's valiant, if weak, attempt at levity; but all she could muster was a stiff smile. "I don't think even Santa can make it tonight," she quipped weakly. Scooting her pajama-clad legs further under the covers, she riffled the pages in her book.

Pausing in the doorway, her silky green top gleaming in the fairy lights on their tree, India questioned once more, "You sure you don't want to come?"

Amy nodded, more than sure. "Thanks, though. You guys have fun."

Pressing her lips together, Amy's roommate nodded in surrender. "All right. But it won't be any fun without you," she added in a persuading, sing-song tone.

"Good-bye, India," Amy chuckled, looking pointedly at the door. Scowling, India clicked the door shut.

Drawing her knees to her chest and wrapping her arms around her legs, Amy peered out the window at the starry night. Pale moonlight illuminated her crestfallen gray eyes and knit brow. A myriad of stars scintillated back at her, and a halo of wispy white moisture encircled the silver crescent moon. Resting her chin on her knees, she sighed through her nose.

Consistently working snowplows had cleared her path to home, but it was too late for her to reach Heartland tonight. She would travel home first thing in the morning and hopefully make it in time for Christmas dinner. Although a few hours didn't really make a difference, she wanted desperately to spend Christmas Eve with her family - and Ty. She wanted to see the decked-out, lit tree, eagerly awaiting the mounds of presents to be placed beneath its sagging boughs; the yards and stables frosted with glistening snow; the farmhouse, decorated to the hilt. She wanted to sleep in her own bed and wake with the thrill of anticipation reminiscent of when she was a little girl waking on Christmas morning.

Resignedly, Amy flicked off the lights on the tree. At the quiet knock on the door, she called, "Come in." Figuring it was just the indomitable India trying one last time to persuade her to attend the party, Amy kept her back turned, listless gray eyes drifting over the tree.

"Amy?"

At the familiar voice, her heart leaped and a smile broke out on her face. She whirled around to see Ty in the doorway. "Ty!" she exclaimed, rushing over to him.

He enveloped her in a warm embrace and murmured into her hair, "Let's go home."


End file.
